Nicholas Carter

Profile

As a recent graduate in the Department of Anthropology, Nicholas is highly interested in Latin American social and political movements, the relationship between art and political society, ethnography, filmmaking, and video production. In 2009-2010, he spent a year abroad in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he studied Argentine history, film, and society, and furthermore developed an interest in the anthropology of music. As an AT&T New Media Fellow in 2012, he traveled to Colombia to explore Afro-Colombian history and identity as expressed through música callejera (street music) in Cartagena de Indias. He has just finished editing a documentary on the topic.

Stories by this author

Just want to get the word out that my documentary, Oíaymelo, will take part in this year's Cine+Más SF: The 2013 San Francisco Latino Film Festival.
it will screen on Saturday, September 14th at the Opera Plaza Cinema as part of the Not So Short...

It's been almost a year since this project began, and I am more than happy to say that the 42-minute documentary, entitled Oíaymelo, is finally finished. Before writing a little about it, I'd first like to say how grateful I am for everyone that...

Having been back from Colombia for a few months now, I am currently finishing up editing the footage for the documentary, a process that should be reaching an end relatively soon. In case you forgot, my project not only asks how public space (...

Today cumbia is easily one of the most internationally popular Latin American musical genres. It's true, the genre did blow up all around the world in the 1960s, gaining huge levels of popularity across the globe. Many different countries throughout...

Almost every evening I've been going to Plaza de los Coches to spend time with the different folclor colombiano music and dance groups that play in the streets of el centro histórico throughout the night. There have usually been three groups...

Hay Festival is an international festival designed to celebrate and discuss today's changing world through discussions surrounding literature, philosophy, contemporary social and cultural issues, the environment, and geopolitics. Each year it brings...

I am beginning with mapalé because it seems to be the most commonly performed rhythm and dance here in the streets of Cartagena. Furthermore, it is one of the Colombian rhythms from the Atlantic coast that is most heavily associated with purely...

During my second day in town, as I was walking leisurely through the brightly colored streets dripping in sweat and searching for a cheap spot to grab a bite for lunch, I came across a small, dark, sort of rugged and free-of-tourists restaurant and...

The video above shows street musicians and dancers performing Mapalé, a coastal musical rhythm and dance that I'll discuss in detail in a later post.
The majority of Afro-Colombians reside on either the Pacific or Caribbean coast, so when I arrived...

Spending a week in this country's beautiful capital, Bogotá, was quite an experience. Housed by a "typical" (in their words) middle-class Colombian family in a neighborhood called América Occidental, I couldn't help but take note of the sheer...

Just hours shy of arriving in Colombia and I can feel the excitement and buzz humming around my ears. In some strange way, I can already hear the rhythms popping from the interactions between hand and drum- the different forms of skin that dance...